While poetry has always been recited, the possibility of recording and listening to poets read and perform, of preserving the transience of their voices, constitutes a major evolution in how we understand the mediums of poetry. Poets encounter the strangeness of their own voice; some venture to create poems for these new recording devices; readers are stunned or moved to discover the voice of a familiar poet. The new medium of recorded poetry becomes the occasion for a renewed encounter with the poem; new modes of publication, new habits, new markets develop: in addition to being read, poetry can be listened to, viewed online. The revival of the poetry reading and the advent of the digital era both contributed to multiplying the mediums in which the poem is encountered.

Sound-recording technologies have existed for over a century and the material accumulated is enormous and extremely heterogeneous, both in terms of carriers (mechanical, magnetic, optical, digital) and sources (phonographic collections, radio and television broadcasts, reading series, private collections…). But too little has been made, at least in France, of these vast resources. Will scholars respond to Jean Tardieu’s and Claude Royet-Journoud’s instigations? These two poets who also worked for the French radio urged researchers, one to analyze “the lines of the voice” and the other to study “how writers read”. More broadly, how do sound recordings modify our conception of what a poem is? Just as genetic criticism reminded us that there are multiple states of a text (drafts, magazine publication, various editions and reprints), sound archives offer another (and sometimes many) versions of the “same” poem, challenging scholars to invent the adequate approach and critical tools to comment upon them.

In the United States, where the revival of the poetry reading dates back to the mid-1950s, the creation of online archives of poetry (chiefly with Pennsound and UbuWeb) is changing how poetry is researched, taught and encountered. Founded in 2003 within the University of Pennsylvania, and now holding over 40.000 audio files and 1000 video files, the Pennsound website has over 6 million downloads each year. Created by and for poets, scholars and teachers, the website also aims to provide the necessary information to contextualize and make sense of these documents. Started by a enthusiastic collector, UbuWeb documents twentieth century avant-garde movements with an impressive gathering of sound, film and text archives, with digitization helping to set poetry in dialogue with other artistic fields.

In 2010, the Library of Congress and the Council on Library and Information Resources published a report entitled The State of Recorded Sound Preservation in the United States: A National Legacy at Risk in the Digital Age which pointed to a vicious circle endangering the preservation of sound archives: “If cataloguing and collection descriptions do not exist, potential users cannot become aware of materials of research value and will not make use of the collections. Low use statistics may argue against obligation of resources to the collections by library and archives administrators, and so on.” In 2015, after a national audit of sound archives around the country to identify threatened collections (UK Sound Directory), the British Library is launching an ambitious 15-year Save our Sounds program to preserve Britain’s sounds and make them available online. Launched in 2014, the Europeana Sounds program is aiming to make one million audio recordings available on Europeana, the European digital library, by 2017.

One of the aims of this conference is to promote an awareness on the part of French institutions of the need to preserve and make available this oral heritage of poetry, to engage in the identification and inventory of collections, their analysis and digitization. The conference hopes to bring together scholars, library and archives administrators (and possibly owners of private collections) to discuss this project in very practical ways: the scholars’ needs, the archives’ financial, legal or human constraints.

- How does a recording take on archival status? How does it become heritage?

- What status should be given to sound-recordings? Are they works in their own rights or documentation? Is the value of all recordings the same? Should one prioritize which recordings to preserve?

- How important are audio/video recordings to poets? Do these recordings have feedback effects on how a poet reads, performs or composes?

- What is the difference between the recording of a live reading and the recording of a radio program?

- What is the difference between an audio recording and a video recording?

- What uses can poetry scholars make of audio/video archives? What does listening to a poet tell us? How can a voice be described, a delivery analyzed? How does one compare various recordings of the same poem? How can new technologies facilitate accessing and analyzing spoken word recordings (see High Performance Sound Technologies for Search and Analysis (HiPSTAS)):

- What pedagogical uses can teachers make of audio/video recordings of poetry?

- What creative uses can be made of audiovisual recordings of poetry? (editing, sampling, recycling, covers)? Do these uses pose specific rights issues?

- What is the place of sound recordings in poetry publishing (records, books+CDs)?

- What are the consequences of the growing online availability of audio/video archives of poetry for the book and publishing in general? Do internet users with free access to online resources turn away from books or come back to books?